A Guide to Python's Magic Methods (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://rszalski.github.io/magicmethods/ <comment><USER2> This part is a little dated (it is a 2012 post after all): [https://rszalski.github.io/magicmethods/#comparisons](https://rszalski.github.io/magicmethods/#comparisons)

In Python 3 __cmp__ is ignored and you have to use the other methods. To make this easier, you can use [https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.t...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.total_ordering)

<comment><USER3> It's amazing that Python 3 was 4 years old when this post was made and yet saying "Python" was still implicitly assumed by basically everyone to mean 2.x.

<comment><USER4> Is it that amazing? I don't think I've had use 3 until this year and I still have to flip-flop.

AND I say this as someone who was reading peps going into 3's release.

Do Ubuntu or Fedora default to python 3 yet? Arch? My RHEL experience isn't as representative.

<comment><USER5> Arch's default is Python 3, but there are still many official Python 2 packages, mostly in community i.e. adopted from the AUR:

Core: 1

Extra: 96

Community: 822

AUR: Over 2300 depending on how you search

<comment><USER6> The official python recommendation is not to "default" the 'python' command as python3, and they should just explicitly be 'python' and 'python3'

This is what every distro except arch does (for whatever reason)

[https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/)

<comment><USER7> But that should turn around NOW, comsidering 2020 will be EOL for Python2 (except for Redhat which will have to ride that dead horse for years to come).

<comment><USER8> RHEL 8 will ship with Python 3 as the default.

[https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.5_release_notes/chap- red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.5_release_notes-deprecated_functionality)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great explanation and a must-read for Python developers. Once you know this stuff, you'll be a much stronger debugger.

But it's also worth throwing a warning out there: when you first learn about a new type of magic, you'll be tempted to use it everywhere. Be careful!

I can recognise a clear specific period in my Python work which was just after I had read this, and a bunch of things suddenly became implicit.

<comment><USER10> > Once you know this stuff, you'll be a much stronger debugger.

As you suggest, more accurately, you'll require the next person who debugs your code to read this, making them much better at debugging your code.

I no longer use magic and completely avoid meta programming in python. It confuses everyone, is not needed (just use a boring factory function), and severely limits who can help you work on your code, for what? A few lines of less boilerplate here and there? "Succinctness"? Some sort of "elegance"? More likely, a DSL that nobody understands but you!

The more I write, and mostly the more I interact with other people, the more I realize that code _needs_ to be boring. No magic. I think this is why go is succeeding: no magic.

<comment><USER11> 100% agree. I figure this is a big part of what turns normal developers into senior developers, and lead developers. It's easy to code. What takes wisdom is 1) knowing what not to write, and 2) self control on how you write it. As a mentor I try to convey this to the fresh new supercoders joining our team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wonderful. I've never seen this resource before.

A related article I got a lot out of was 'Understanding Python Metaclasses', an in-depth breakdown of Python class instantiation. Here's the link to that:

[https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2015/02/09/understanding-python- meta...](https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2015/02/09/understanding-python-metaclasses/)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's awesome that someone has taken the time to write this all up. With reference to this section ([https://rszalski.github.io/magicmethods/#descriptor](https://rszalski.github.io/magicmethods/#descriptor)) the author mentions that descriptors are "meant to be held by an owner class." which is true, however in their example, they are storing the value as `self.value` on the descriptor object itself meaning that if the user were to have two instances of `Distance` all their values would be the same for meter or foot on all instances of `Distance`. One way to solve this is to store the values in a dictionary-like structure on the descriptor, e.g. `self.data[instance] = your_stored_value`.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is when you get to this part of python, that you achieve true Nirvana.

It's absolutely bonkers the extent to which you can be dynamic in this language.

It's the very reason why Django is so DRY.

<comment><USER15> Django's DRY suuuuuuuucks when you're getting started. It's basically all this magic that you can't understand without already knowing Django.

Why does get_attr get called? Oh because it begins with the word "get" and there's an attribute that defines a method field called "attr".

I use Django a lot and generally it's great. But I hate that you can't follow your code paths from start to finish on the surface. You have to know about how it works underneath. Meaning you can't just be a python + web server expert. You have to also be a Django expert. So I get non-Django experts reviewing code and they have no clue why things work or break.

Just an opinion. Not saying this is objectively wrong.

<comment><USER16> People who feel this way usually use Flask instead. Worth checking out.

[http://flask.pocoo.org/](http://flask.pocoo.org/)

<comment><USER15> Flask is great for smaller things where Django is far too verbose. Like single file webservers for basic stuff.

Its also for more complex stuff but then you have to grab additional libraries to do stuff like db management, migrations, serialization, etc.

Flask also has some, in my opinion, rather uncomfortablly unintuitive global scope stuff. Where responses aren't passed into the view function, they're available on the imported flask object.

<comment><USER16> Good to know. I haven't used Flask recently, I have used Express.js which is Node.js's version of Flask, and I really like how simple it is. Most apps these days seem to have a REST (or GraphQL) backend and dynamic (often React.js) frontend. Flask (and Flask-RESTful) would probably be a better fit for this type of app than Django.

<comment><USER15> Yeah don't let me dissuade you. Flask is a prime piece of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Be sure to read "Appendix 2: Changes in Python 3" at the very end of the document! I was preparing a long "Actually..." rant before I saw that.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Be careful, however, as there is no guarantee that __del__ will be executed > if the object is still alive when the interpreter exits, so __del__ can't > serve as a replacement for good coding practices (like always closing a > connection when you're done with it.

When the interpreter exits, your program's resources should be reclaimed by the operating system, right? So why not just use __del__?

<comment><USER19> You almost always only want to implement __del__ if you're writing an extension in C. Otherwise, the GC generally takes care of cleanup perfectly fine.

And in cases like the one cjhanks describes, __del__ doesn't get called reliably enough. In those cases, using a contextmanager is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a godsend. Thank you. Without this, I'd nearly given up on python already, but, wow, thank you.

<comment><USER21> While there's no harm in having a second guide, I just want to make sure folks do know this is in the official documentation: [https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html](https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html)

(The article will perhaps be a better guide to those newer; the data model page is … pretty dense.)

Also, I find is exceptionally handy to have a Chrome "search engine" for the Python docs while I work. That is, on chrome://settings/searchEngines I have added a custom search engine with this setup:

      Search Engine: Python Docs
      Keyword: py
      URL: https://google.com/search?q=site:https://docs.python.org/3+%s&btnI

(The URL is an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google, limited to the Python 3 docs. Note that it is set to search Python 3.)

This allows me to type, e.g.,

      py data model

in the URL and get the above page. Want the asyncio module docs?

      py asyncio

(I similarly have "mdn" for the developer.mozilla.org docs, which are also excellent.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good guide, but missing Python 3's __next__.</comment>


Show HN: Yahoo! Fantasy Football as a Real Time Event Source - <AUTHOR> https://pipedream.com/sources/new?app=yahoo <comment><USER2> this looks interesting.</comment>


Maps of Modern Cities Drawn in the Style of J.R.R. Tolkien (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://io9.gizmodo.com/maps-of-modern-cities-drawn-in-the-style-of-j-r-r-tolk-1641367075 <comment><USER2> Related (UK parks):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16311087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16311087)</comment>


Salesforce Fires 1k on Day Its Stock Soars to All Time High - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1298714506479038468 <comment><USER2> Good for them, this'll give them some room to increase headcount.</comment>


Ask HN: Is 'Silicon Valley' a Healthy Place to Work? - <AUTHOR> I have never posted here before.  Please accept mis-steps.
I, like many aspiring software hobbyists and enthusiasts, came to SF Bay to learn and practice.  In 5 years I have met people living in extraordinary circumstances.
- Commuting 2+ hours in traffic several times a week.
- People living in apartments nearer their work, 3-4 days/week.  Separated from their family and children.
- Individuals working 50+ hours / week with less than 3 weeks vacation per year.
- People sacrificing their own health and well-being (and psychological well-being) in the pursuit of profit.
- Widespread and rampant personal depression.
Sincerely, it makes me glum.
Are there any parts of the Bay (or the) industry, which are not like this? Are there any other engineers who have experienced similar feelings, and left?  Where? <comment><USER2> I see much of the above, but not the rampant depression you mention.

I also see parking lots full of BMWs, and many Teslas.

And some leading-edge work being done.

And pleasantly-intellectual conversations between like-minded individuals.

But for some, the cons outweigh the pros. Anyone feeling rampant depression should make some changes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is like an MMA fighter asking "Is MMA a healthy occupation to have?"

Of course not. You have to make tradeoffs in life.</comment>


Show HN: CHIP-8 console implemented in FPGA - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pwmarcz/fpga-chip8 <comment><USER2> I saw the portion of the description that talked about BCD conversion. One magical method I've used in the past on FPGAs is the Double Dabble algorithm [0]. Seems like your implementation is succinct enough to not need improvements, but if you're looking for resource usage reductions it might help out. In addition, always enjoy talking about good ole Double Dabble, such a fun name for an algorithm.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dabble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dabble)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hah, cool, I'm working on one right now too. Got most of the way through it, it's an awesome learning experience about what you can achieve with FPGAs and what the limitations are. Especially implementing the 'complex' instructions like drawing.

<comment><USER4> The way it's usually done now is, people simply go with implementing some kind of a PSM ("programmable state machine"), which is essentially a tiny microprocessor, and then let the program do the, say, drawing (by either setting bits in video memory, sending commands to an SPI display, or directly generating VGA signals).

<comment><USER5> It gets the job done and can be efficient from a development perspective. If high speed (ops/sec) operation isn't required, this sort of approach can be pretty useful.

I needed to do a "headless" build of an FPGA where the software wasn't ready yet, but the RF guys needed the FPGA operate as if software was there and running the show. I did a sort of PSM as you call it that was like a really basic processor. Peek, Poke, Test, Jump, Inc, Dec. It was very helpful for debug, and the RF guys were able to make progress weeks before software was ready to go. Plus the software builds were very focussed on flight, and not doing special configurations to help others figure out corner case issues.

For a hobby project, depending on the goals of why one is doing the project, I think it's a fine approach. Gets results fast which helps with motivation and momentum to learn more difficult things. It's also a natural bridge for people coming from a software background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that the best part of this for me is that they managed to map pins 5-12 to match the screen SPI pins. I suppose that once you have a ground pin, the rest can be mapped in software (with the power being a high output), but it's still pretty cool to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, thanks! What I'm doing in the code is outputting 1 to the VCC pin and 0 to GND, and that seems to be enough:

[https://github.com/pwmarcz/fpga- chip8/blob/2168aeea3b1cef3ba...](https://github.com/pwmarcz/fpga- chip8/blob/2168aeea3b1cef3ba421f6becf7cfc476275699e/chip8.v#L34)

<comment><USER6> yeah, that definitely makes sense. I'll have to start doing that when I connect screens or sensors: much cleaner, thanks for the inspiration!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing! I spent one day this autumn getting the open source toolchain working and dimming the onboard led on an upduino. Turns out testing on hardware when you don't know what you're doing is cumbersome (surprising!). Your codebase (hardware definition base?) and tests will make good reading material.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear! Just don't take my code as an example of any good practices, I have no background in HDLs and this is my first big project, so it's all very hacky.</comment></comment>


Deep packet inspection used to stop censorship - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/researchers-develop-end-to-middle-anti-censorship-tech.ars

<comment><USER2> They should find a name that isn't already used.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex>

</comment><comment><USER3> If Telex is ever to become adopted on a wide-scale, it needs to happen _now_. Think about it: governments, in general, are not becoming more friendly toward an open Internet.

No governing body will want to deploy Telex more next year than they do this year.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not well-versed in cryptography, but how do I know that I'm talking to a "trustworthy telex"? What's to prevent the bad guy from poisoning the network with his "telex" router?

</comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately, I don't see why any government (including western democracies) would support a system that reduces their ability to censor traffic within its borders.

</comment><comment><USER6> _government help will likely be needed to get a system like Telex off the ground_

I can't see this as being good for international policy. Imagine China's response to the US directly helping people circumvent their controls. That might as well be a soft declaration of war.

</comment><comment><USER7> Am I wrong in my understanding that there is a single private key which, if stolen, will cause the whole system to fall apart?

<comment><USER8> That's not the case.

Each Telex Station has it's own private key which it uses to decrypt the 224 bit tag. If one Telex station loses its private key, then the user will just use another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like it will be a difficult sell to any government (even "liberal democracies"), let alone an ISP.

<comment><USER10> I've no doubt they can monetize it, but I suspect there'll be "traffic forwarding" libraries popping up on Github, if this idea takes off

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only this could be somehow tranformed into a p2p based service...

<comment><USER3> P2P does help promote anonymity and platform robustness. What aspect of Telex do you suppose could use P2P?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> great this could also be used to bypass enterprise url filters. joy

</comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating innovation!</comment>


Here Is Today (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://hereistoday.com

<comment><USER2> I'd like to also see it go in the opposite direction, in smaller parts of a day.</comment>


Microcode: the place where hardware and software meet - <AUTHOR> http://alanwinfield.blogspot.co.uk/2006/02/on-microcode-place-where-hardware-and.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this question on Super User: _How does a CPU 'know' what commands and instructions actually mean?_ [http://superuser.com/questions/307116/how-does-a-cpu-know- wh...](http://superuser.com/questions/307116/how-does-a-cpu-know-what- commands-and-instructions-actually-mean)

Microcode in its most basic form is just a big look-up table (could be nested if word size is limited) containing the electrical signals for a particular instruction, and a new address to "jump" to (either a subsequent micro- operation, or jump back to the "fetch" micro-op). _Electrically_ , however, there's no difference between a microcoded and hard-wired CPU - they both fetch and execute sequences of instructions.

Of course, there's an obvious advantage to the microcoded approach: your instruction set gets uploaded to your hardware in a ROM! You can change the operation of instructions _after_ the hardware is made, make custom sequences of instructions, or even fix microcode bugs (while uncommon, there have been cases in the past).

<comment><USER3> Uncommon? I'd venture to say that all desktop architectures have known bugs. Some are just documented, some are fixed by microcode, some require work arounds in software "or" compilers.

Example: (core i7, may 2011) [http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.p...](http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.pdf)

BIOS updates often contain bugfixes for your CPU.

<comment><USER4> I don't like waiting for BIOS vendors to package cpu firmware updates and I don't like to update the BIOS unless I have to. If you are running debian just install (amd64|intel)-microcode[1]. The package provides the most recent microcode updates from the CPU vendor and updates the microcode on boot.

[1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/11/msg00193.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Donn Stewart has a very enlightening and relatively simple explanation on the very basics of how a CPU works, which includes a great explanation of microcode and the control cycle.

<http://cpuville.com/cpu_design.pdf>

And here's his main site: <http://cpuville.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Clicking on <http://cpuville.com/cpu_design.pdf> gives me:

        Forbidden
        Remote Host: [<redacted>]

        You do not have permission to access this
        page or file

        Data files must be stored on the same site
        they are linked from.

To see the PDF you need to visit the main page and then click through. Fortunately, if you first try the forbidden page, the link you want will already be purple for you.

<comment><USER6> I can see it by turning off my referer in Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original ARM RISC design did away with Microcode, with the chip executing instructions directly, although I think it might have crept back in since then

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Instruction_se...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Instruction_set)

<comment><USER8> There are many more machines without microcode - 6502, machineForth chips like f21, c18 etc. I'd argue that they are much more appealing to a designer with taste.

<comment><USER9> I think that the 6502 decode ROM which matches opcode bits and sequence numbers to internal CPU functions is a very good example. It can be seen as either just a rather complex demultiplexer or, with keeping the sequencing nature in mind as a minimal, hard coded, computer program.

Does microcode have to execute like traditional software to be called microcode?

<comment><USER10> The 6502 is an interesting case. The decode ROM (PLA) gets instructions about 1/3 of the way decoded, and then there's a whole pile of random control logic [1], [2] that generates the actual control lines [3]. The output from the decode ROM consists of semi-meaningless things such as ADC/SBC in state T0, or JSR in T5 [4], and after a whole bunch of gates these get turned into the actual control functions such as S bus to A register. [3]

[1] image of the 6502 at <http://www.visual6502.org/images/6502/index.html>

[2] schematic [http://www.visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=650X_Schemati...](http://www.visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=650X_Schematic_Notes)

[3] block diagram [http://www.weihenstephan.org/~michaste/pagetable/6502/6502.j...](http://www.weihenstephan.org/~michaste/pagetable/6502/6502.jpg)

[4] details of ROM <http://visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=6507_Decode_ROM>

<comment><USER11> "Random control logic" Oxymoron?

Is the control logic really _random_ in some way? That sounds impossible. Or at least, very highly inefficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's obviously not random. It is carefully designed, but there is no regularity to it. The expression "random logic" is used to describe the circuitry that is _"ad hoc"_ rather than a matrix, like RAM, registers, or an ALU.

Google the expression to learn more.

* <http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=random+logic>

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_logic>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A bit off topic, but I've always wondered why some refer to the language as 'assembler' whereas others call it 'assembly'. I always thought the assembler is the name of the thing that reads in your assembly code and turns it into a machine binary. Is there some historical significance to calling it 'assembler'?

<comment><USER13> I'm not old enough to know but my theory is things in the programming world historically came from the computer architectural world. Computer architecture uses stacks, interrupts (events), and other things in the physical layout of the computer chip. When people were done with the hardware stuff, they created software which has similarities to hardware and thus called them the same. When people then created higher level software from lower level software, they saw similarities there as well and went from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am still unclear after reading the article.

What is the exact interface where a software change leads to a change in some physical word state?

For instance, logically storing X in some register is going to lead to some particular configuration of electrical current on the CPU. I still don't see the exact point where that happens.

How do the two intersect?

<comment><USER15> I highly recommend the book, and the course, <http://www.nand2tetris.org/> (previously known as The Elements of Computing Systems or TECS).

This starts with discussion on NAND gates and goes through building CPU components, to a complete computer, to implementing a high-level language for it.

(All the chapters from the book revevant to your question are available as free PDFs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ... music, movies, and pizza delivery?</comment>


Access and Excel vs Web 2.0 - <AUTHOR>

Working as a Java consultant, so far I have never had a contract request for a Web 2.0 application. The bulk of (boring) projects that are being conducted in the industry seems to be transferring old processes based on Access and Excel to Web Applications, so that some company or other can have a distributed workflow.
So, inspired by the other post about the impeding crisis of the web, I thought I'd put forward the idea that if the IT industry has been relatively healthy lately, it was not because of a boom of Web 2.0 startups, but rather because of said Access to Web exodus. However, that will only be a finite source of new work, as eventually all Excel sheets will have been migrated (or switched to Google apps). Hopefully by then Web 2.0 will be the job motor...
On a related note, is Excel perhaps the most overlooked "Virtual Machine" out there? Here is a business idea I just remembered: a platform for sharing special purpose Excel sheets. For example you want to create a business plan, might be nice to have a trusted source for looking for an Excel template (ie social network like, rated by users etc.), rather than having to Google for it and download it from weird sources. No idea how to deal with the danger of viri, though.
<comment><USER2> Excel can be a good intermediate representation for talented non-programmers.

A few years back I did some work with a non-programmer who was an expert in administrating Microsoft Exchange. Other programmers were expected to get knowledge from him but the team didn't have a good way to represent it and very attempt at getting him to do CIM-style modeling was a disaster.

I was new to the team when they asked me to help. I threw together some Perl modules that took an Active Directory dump and generated a pile of Excel workbooks and made those the common model for the information.

None of the other programmers liked the idea of Perl, but I was able to encapsulate it as a special Visual Studio build rule so they never had to do anything other than occasionally run a special build rule.

The result was a success because Excel was something the expert understood and working from the generated worksheet allowed everyone to come to agreement on what existing entities and attributes were needed to do what they wanted.</comment>


SETI Institute suspends search for aliens - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_17926565 <comment><USER2> This is sad to read, but perhaps an opportunity in disguise.

It is a risk for any firm to be highly dependent on one customer for most of its revenue and SETI appears to have been highly dependent on US government funding.

It is dangerous to make conclusions based on a newspaper article, but it seems they found $50 million in private donations way back when to build the network. Now they can't find $2.5 million per year to run it?

If nothing else, something is seriously wrong if donors that ponied up $50 million to build the Ferrari no longer want to shell out $2.5 million run it.

The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors - and continues this focus even after an evident failure of that model to keep things running. Meeting the needs of government funders and meeting the needs of donors are entirely different things. In my experience, you can have one or the other, but not both.

They should step back and rethink how they can make their non-profit work primarily based on voluntary donations. The world is full of non-profits that manage it with budgets much larger than the $2.5 million/year SETI appears to need.

Link to send SETI money: <http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=1468>

<comment><USER3> I'd be reluctant to invest more in an investment that has never paid off. They're searching for signs of life. Signs found so far = 0. Thats a pretty bad ROI.

<comment><USER4> Actually quite a lot of research has no apparent practical payoff - it's still worth doing though.

Edit: Or the results of the research can be completely serendipitous products that are only tenuously related to the original research - my favorite example of this being the best known product of high energy physics research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just in case anyone didn't bother reading the article - SETI is not calling off all of their searches, just shutting down one of its main radio arrays in Mountain View. Their other time-shared operations sound like they'll continue.

Not really sure why people feel like misrepresenting articles like this all the time, but this is one of them.

<comment> T-hawk The article misrepresents itself. "Said SETI Director Jill Tarter, 'that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen.'"

It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms", etc.

Anyone around here familiar with the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" coined by Jerry Pournelle? For every sufficiently large organization, self-preservation and expansion inevitably crowd out the organization's ostensible purpose. SETI's primary purpose is not to find extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI's primary purpose is to ensure the continued existence of and wages paid to SETI. Actually finding the aliens is a secondary goal.

(I am not ragging on SETI in particular here, that happens for every bureaucracy. The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space. The primary purpose of TSA is to get TSA workers hired and paid, not to secure airways. The primary purpose of unions in education is to get themselves hired and paid, not to educate. These organizations do accomplish their stated goals to some and varying degrees of success, but never at any cost of imperiling their own demesne.)

<comment><USER6> _The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space_

You're joking, right?

So you're saying that the purpose of everything is to make money, not to make what those enterprises were built to do in the first place?

No wonder capitalism is the root of almost all our evils nowadays.. I feel really sorry for you.

<comment><USER7> Is this not a reasonable suggestion? Any organisation which is unable to ensure its financial survival will by definition go extinct and so be unable to achieve anything else.

<comment><USER6> There's a _huge_ difference between saying "ensure financial survival" and "their primary purpose is to get paid".

One puts money above everything. The other considers it a mean for a higher purpose.

Can you tell the difference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The beginning of the article is incorrect in identifying the Allen Array as the array in the film "Contact". That was the Very Large Array.

</comment><comment><USER9> _"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tartar, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."_

That sounds more unfortunate than ironic. It would be ironic if funding went directly from SETI to the satellite which found the planets.

</comment><comment><USER10> A better use of funds would be grants or investments in non-government space exploration / cargo / communications / research. That could be nonprofits or companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX. The latter is actually producing something we need.

SETI will detect radio signals from an intelligent source, sure. "We have detected extraterrestrial intelligence, and it is us." It's better for US interests if the source is speaking English, not Russian (only program capable now of delivering astronauts to ISS) or Chinese. So don't mourn the loss of SETI funding. Celebrate when you find out that it's going to something more productive.

<comment><USER11> Of course, realistically speaking the money will probably just be appropriated by some Senator to build roads in Montana going nowhere.

<comment><USER10> Maybe. At least some though are working on a bill to mandate a permanent base on the moon. That's a decent piece of high ground. And if it has a core of iron as has recently been suggested, could lead to some interesting research. Might even shed light on some phenomena down here on the blue ball.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like massive mis-management of money. Paul Allen contributed $50M to build the array. Whoever was managing that project should have thought about sticking back 30% or so for running it after it got built. Didn't have enough to build all the scopes? Build a few at a time.

Presumably this is what happens when you don't have clear goals and objectives laid out - and oversight to make sure you don't screw it up.

Pretty sad. They should be asking for new leadership and $20M to run it for 10 years.

<comment><USER13> With donations you don't always get to allocate money in the most appropriate manner. The $50M could have been directed for construction only or it might have had a fixed split attached (e.g. 75% construction, 25% maintenance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This needs to be crowd-sourced.

Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.

<comment><USER15> Surely there's at least one Bill Gates who could spare 5 mil :)

<comment><USER10> Bill Gates might rather cure river blindness, malaria and cholera. He's at that stage when a billionaire thinks about humanitarian legacy. Similar to Andrew Carnegie and the moguls of that generation.

<comment><USER16> Discovering another instance of intelligent life would be one of the most profound transformational experiences that we could have as a species. I would think that there would be more than one billionaire out there that would like their name to be associated with such a discovery.

<comment><USER17> I'm rather bullish on matters of space exploration, but I'm pretty skeptical about just how profoundly transformational a SETI discovery would be. If there were such a discovery, it would be beset by difficult-to-imagine communication challenges, not the least of which is a years- or decades-long delay between sending a signal and receiving any response.

There have also been some cogent arguments that it might be in the best interests of our own self-preservation to not broadcast our presence, for now, just because we are still technologically primitive. Being loud represents a big wager that anything else within hearing distance is friendly.

I'm mostly disappointed at this announcement because it is part of a trend in dwindling government support for exploration.

<comment><USER18> We're _already_ being loud. We've been leaking radio transmissions into space for the past century.

<comment><USER19> We have been leaking analog radio transmissions for such a short period of time during the lifetime of the universe that any other life out there would most likely be either underdeveloped or overdeveloped to receive the transmissions.

We have barely uttered a sound in the universe.

<comment><USER20> The mind-blowingly relevant picture: [http://proto- knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubb...](http://proto- knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubble-in-milky-way.html)

Of course, light goes really, really fast compared to anything physics says we can possibly manage for things with more rest mass than photons. Although there could be aliens on another spiral arm, or Andromeda, communication would take longer than the lifetime of our civilization; and material trade would take longer than the lifetime of our species.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Why do people assume you can just make a phone call to Andromeda? 'Ya, hi ET, what's new?' If Andromeda disappeared into a black hole 1 million years ago, we wouldn't even know yet. We have to wait 2.5 million years for news from Andromeda, assuming the news can't transcend the speed of light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Searching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization the potential for profit would be huge. On the other hand, good luck executing on that.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond).

First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it.

In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess.

And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.

<comment><USER23> There is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.

<comment><USER11> Yes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist (them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves) because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one occurrence that shouldn't have happened.

<comment><USER23> Interesting point, but given the amount of randomness involved in evolution, the physical complexity of cognition, and the timescales involved, is it possible that even given massive numbers of cognitively advanced species in the universe, each could have such a fundamentally distinct ontological relationship to reality and model of the physical universe that even a concept as seemingly scientifically basic as a 'radio wave' would be unique to us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> this sounds like it has the potential for the largest kickstarter funded project to date!

</comment><comment><USER25> Part of me hopes the secret reason for this is they've actually discovered some so they don't feel they need to keep looking right now.

Paul Allen is still worth billions, can't he help a little more?

<comment><USER26> I often think about that - if life elsewhere were discovered, what would be the repercussions of letting the public know? If the gap between replies were 10 or more years, how many people would just give up work figuring it was pointless? Would society as we know it collapse?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google to the rescue!

Seriously, first they are both located at Mountain View. Second it is not that much money to begin with, at least for Google. Third it totally fits Google's pet project description - wildly awesome but realistically little chance to produce result.

</comment><comment><USER28> I feel really sorry about it and I hope they'll make it.

Maybe they should consider writing more appreciated applications.

They could write more applications which involve people for the AI search.

I don't know what could reduce time to find AI, but I would bet SETI could get many volunteers if they just would provide a social network application (e.g. facebook).

There must be more than just calculation distribution.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone have any insight as to how they justify 2.5 million dollars per year in operating expenses?

</comment><comment><USER30> Some TV-Channel on alpha centauri just lost a viewer. Or maybe not, since we didn't find the channel yet.

</comment><comment><USER31> They should 'open-source' this project.

</comment><comment><USER32> Although I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is a waste of time (not factoring in any advances in science/engineering that have been derived from the project).

I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.

<comment><USER33> I ran Seti@Home for years; after I found out about Folding@Home, I switched over; disease research yields short- and long-term benefits.

<http://folding.stanford.edu/>

<comment><USER34> Does Folding@Home really yield a lot? I did some quick figuring (<http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing>) and that project costs a lot, while, as far as I can tell, delivering little _especially_ compared to alternate charities.

<comment><USER33> You write, "$12.65 million is a lot of money. What could we do with that?" Here are some issues:

1\. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.

2\. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses. I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.

3\. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.

<comment><USER34> > 1\. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs > Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to > a charitable organization.

Either you are paying for all of your electrical bill or you're not.

If you are paying for all of it, then yes, you can donate your electrical costs! just don't run Folding@Home and send Oxfam or whatever a Paypal donation at the end of the year.

If you are not paying for all of it, if someone is sharing the bill or footing the bill entirely, then donating directly may harm your pocketbook, yes. But in such a situation, does it really still make sense to force the other to pay for all the electricity you are using? The overall economics are bad per the original note, it's an inefficient way to turn someone else's money into charity. What right do you have to burn the electricity like there's no tomorrow, for that matter? (If you weren't going to use a year's worth of electricity, then whomever is paying for your electricity is poorer by that $10 as surely as if you had pick-pocketed him of $10.)

> 2\. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific > contributions by the masses.

'Scientific contributions'? What contributions? If you just mean, let the masses feel like they're doing something useful, then Folding@Home could do us all a favor and make the main loop of the daemon a call to sleep()! If you mean, actual scientific progress, that overlaps with your point #3 which I'll get to.

> I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split > across scores of charities.

A dollar is a dollar, no matter where it comes from. If you and 99 other people each donate $100 to 100 charities, then it's the same as if each person donated $10,000 to just 1 charity. The only difference is whatever overhead there might be; and even if we say that our Folding@Home contributors lose 50% to overhead and the charities wind up getting only $6 million in their bank accounts to use, that's still thousands more lives saved than by running Folding@Home and wasting the same amount of money!

> 3\. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not > millions of lives.

This is the key question. If Folding@Home has expected value of thousands of lives a year, then running it is fine. But if it's not producing...

For these sort of stakes, one would hope that one had really good evidence. But let's lower standards and merely ask for ordinary evidence. What reason do you have to think Folding@Home has such extraordinary potential? It has been operating for nearly _11_ years. 11! And nothing that has saved a single life. (You are free to provide a counter-example.) At what point do we stop talking about its potential to save millions of lives and about the possibility of teapots in orbit around Mercury?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My worst fear comes alive, people; they walk among us, suspending our search projects.

<comment><USER36> The second foundation is here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Seth Shostak's podcast - <http://radio.seti.org/> . Highly recommended ;-)</comment>


Show HN: Web-Scale UUID as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://uuid.rocks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! I know this seems kind of silly but for some reason I felt inspired to build this yesterday. Not only is it fast all around the world since it's built on Cloudflare Workers, but when you call it from another Worker it responds within ~5ms [0].

[0] [https://uuid-rocks-speedtest.jacobhands.com/](https://uuid-rocks- speedtest.jacobhands.com/)</comment>


The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 <comment><USER2> I have to say when I took an extended layover in Doah it gave me a different sense of urgency about climate change. It was just oppressive to be outside, even during the night and they air-condition their open air markets. It got me thinking that there are a lot of places like this which are probably on the edge, and where a few degrees of warming will make them simply uninhabitable to humans. It would be a strange thing to have "hot zones" like we have arctic regions where it's not possible to go without special equipment.

<comment><USER3> Now is the time to buy a flat-ish block of land in Alaska or Tasmania that's a little back from the waters edge. Also make sure you don't have too many tree's too close to where you want to build your doomsday cabin. :) Really you don't be between the tropics of Cancer of Capricorn. in the future

<comment><USER4> When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

When I was a teen I was sure we were headed for a bad future if we didn't act but I always thought it'd come after I am dead. Now I am scared I am going to be old and too frail to manage when life on earth will turn sour.

edit: maybe it's time we put out a a Pioneer 10 plate with messages of warning about our own failures. One we send to space, another one we leave on earth.

<comment><USER5> > When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not > be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

I can only hope so.

<comment><USER6> State enforced private land ownership is one of the key economic fundamentals of a prosperous society.

Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).

Do you have any grounds why you would want it abolished?

<comment><USER4> > Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and > more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all > land).

Am I correct to assume you include communist and feudal regimes ?

<comment><USER6> Well, in Feudal system you don't really _own_ the land. You can tax the peasants farming it in exchange for military services for the state. But for example you can't parcel it to small farms and sell those for their owners to keep, or anything like that. You can't use the land as your own _capital_ , with all the financial potential of an asset.

I'd love to hear counterexamples, but that's the general gist of it in the large scale I think.

Land ownership is not a silver bullet but in general smart parcelling policies have made nations wealthier. So basically, most wealthy states today at some point in their history have issued a parcelling policy that has distributed land ownership among farms. This has made the economic basis more vibrant and more durable. And, probably also affected the evolution of their political institutions to be more inclusive.

For example, see the parcelling in my country Finland (which was Sweden at the time) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_(Sweden)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_\(Sweden\)) and earlier in British enclosure [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personal anectode.

I already can't bear summer. I don't have AC, as most people don't have it here in Switzerland. Even offices tend to not have them. There are 1 to 2 months a year where my productivity sinks, enjoyment of life plummets and I just want it all to be over.

I also barely see any snow anymore, if I don't hike in the mountains. I love snow.

The change is real and I hate it. Couldn't it be global cooling instead of warming? Damn physics.

<comment><USER8> You live in an extremely rich country, surely you can afford to install an AC unit if it impacts you as much as you're saying.

Seems like that has a much better shot at solving your problem than waiting for the world to address global climate change.

<comment><USER9> I'm grateful AC are frowned upon in Europe. Putting a band-aid by consuming even more energy is insane in large scale, with the perverse effect of hiding the problem and delaying awareness.

<comment><USER10> Heating freezing temperatures to livable takes more energy than air conditioning. Logically, we should frown upon living in cold places with extended winter more than we frown upon living in places that require air conditioning.

<comment><USER9> Sure, I'm not debating AC vs Heating, but that installing AC alone in the majority of the millions of European homes that don't have it because it's starting to get too hot in the summer is not only not a solution to the general problem but can have perverse short term effects. My point about being grateful is that I hope it'll push more awareness and starting action now, compared to the US where prevalent AC might hide the issue longer. But that's just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related feature piece:

>What It's Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable

[https://time.com/longform/jacobabad-extreme- heat/](https://time.com/longform/jacobabad-extreme-heat/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobabad#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobabad#Climate)

</comment><comment><USER12> Color me optimistic, but we'll learn to survive and adapt. Humans in temperate climates (Chicago, Toronto, etc.) already live in places where it's too cold to survive outside for long in winter. Just replace heaters with ACs in this case.

<comment><USER13> Having lived both in the extreme heat of South Asia and the extreme cold of the Canada, cold is technically a lot easier to deal with physically. Wearing the right clothes will let you survive indefinitely in temperatures as low as -10C. You are also not in danger of dehydration. Note that -10C is -30-35C away from comfortable temperature (20-25C).

If you just go +20C from comfortable temperature, no amount of clothing will help you survive for very long out in the open. You also have to drink copious amounts of water and salts to avoid dehydrating to death.

Secondly, heating up a closed space is a lot cheaper than cooling it down. Heating can always be done by burning fuel, but cooling greater than 5C requires heat pumps.

The economics and practicalities of heat and cold adaptions are completely different.

<comment><USER10> Fair point, though we are very far away from people dressing for Antarctica while they sit on the couch watching Netflix.

You are also leaving snow and ice out of it. There are economics and externalities of moving tons of solid matter around with relatively low latency (people have to work, trucks have to ship). There are also the safety implications and costs associated. Traffic and accident rates do not go up because the precipitation was unexpectedly ten degrees warmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The narrative of combating global warming / climate change is ineffective and it misses the point. The Earth can quite naturally be inhospitable to human life. The narrative needs to be one of terraforming our own planet.

<comment><USER15> There are several problems with this approach.

The person performing the forming would essentially be cleaning up the polution of everyone else. Terraforming would require global agreement and adherence to a highly capital-intensive enterprise. This is not unlike the discussions about limiting global warming, which are not a frank success.

We currently have no means of cleaning up that is more efficient ie less costly) than the methods we gave for limiting pollution. And it is already impossible to get people to accept to pay those costs.

That is not to say that it should not be researched. But to propose it as an alternative is not helpful in the current political context. It is akin to saying "yea but we'll win the lottery anyway" when other people are trying to get the community to accept a balancing of the budget.

<comment><USER16> > But to propose it as an alternative is not helpful in the current political > context

Suggesting that we should keep silent about a way of solving the problem, so that other people don't get "ideas", is even less helpful in any context, as you lose your credibility in the eyes of people whom you are trying to convince.

> essentially be cleaning up the pollution of everyone else. Terraforming > would require global agreement and adherence to a highly capital-intensive > enterprise

That would be true if we were talking about a toxic substance, CO2 is not a pollutant, and there are ways to use it: for instance by terraforming deserts into living ecosystems that would use the extra CO2. And this includes not only deserts like sahara, but also vast areas of ocean devoid of life because of currents not lifting nutrients from the bottom of the sea.

People do not accept to pay costs for "limiting pollution" because they are not convinced that proposed solutions can work with anywhere reasonable cost. And for that we need not to simply talk everyone into accepting unviable solution out of fear, but to propose something that works and provides additional benefits. Terraforming deserts and controlling the weather is one such solution, which gets unfairly dismissed and downvoted.

<comment><USER15> It does not matter if it is toxic or not. It's a chemical byproduct that we don't want in the atmosphere. That means it's a pollutant.

Sure. Terra forming works. Conceptually. If you can manage to build a rainforest in the desert, that will fix some co2. That is not the issue. The issue is: how to build a rainforest in the desert. Technically, and economically.

Have you considered the amount of water you'd need? The irrigation system required for that? Where would the water come from? For reference, there is already a lot of geopolitics over water supply in the middle east. Have you considered how poor the soil is? How much work it would be to enrich that soil? We are already raising alarm bells regarding our phosphate stock. How would you keep the ecosystem in balance? If you can't you don't need an army of people to maintain it.

Most importantly, it would only buy you time. It would fix some of the co2 in trees. But if we continue to burn oil, we'll keep adding co2 to the atmosphere. Every barrel of oil is 430 kilos of co2. That's a lot of tree for one barrel.

And you've only fixed it temporarily. If at any time your artificial forest collapses (this being your first terra forming attempt), your trees decompose and release the co2.

Again. I'm not saying that any option should be off the table. But I do not think it benefits the already complicated debates, if we present theoretical scenarios as solutions.

<comment><USER16> You do not build a rainforest in a desert, you build a densely populated region with lots of agricultural land and some forests, so that people living there take care of enriching the soil and making sure that nothing collapses.

To do that we need to learn how to control the weather. There are multiple possible ways, like using mirrors in space, using large number of aerostats to change reflectivity, and to guide clouds to the place we need, solar updraft towers to inject dust from lower layers of the atmosphere into higher layers to form clouds, etc. Many of these are may not work, and many won't be cheap, but they will give us more control over the environment and will enable more people to live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours' duration (fig. S2). They are concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and coastal southwest North America, in close proximity to extraordinarily high SSTs and intense continental heat that together favor the occurrence of extreme humid heat (2, 14).

Future Indian geopolitics is certainly going to be interesting. Would like to see these hotspots mapped for the next 20-30 years to highlight the scope of the situation. Will certain areas become perennially uninhabitable? Is it a matter of having AC / low humidity shelters that people flock to a couple hours a day during seasonal peaks? Estimates on climate refugees and migration patterns etc. I suspect it's going to be onerous but workable. There's low energy dehumidifying HVAC solutions that might be attainable even in poorer communities. Ultimately, petro rich countries like middle East and North America is going to be fine and AC through the solution if they have to, aggravating the problem for everyone else. Regardless, it's a problem worth mitigating and acclimatizing to, 85% of the world is seeking to develop and will do so via the most cost-efficient (currently dirty) methods possible. IMO, accommodating for this is a greater moral imperative that's ultimately incompatible with aggregate reduction in emissions - that was never workable. Developed countries should still strive to improve efficient and innovate to flatten the environmental cost curve per unit of quality of improvement, and modify their life styles so that rampant consumptive culture is not the aspired endpoint. But that's even harder said then done because capitalism.

<comment><USER18> Many parts of South Asia already have home-grown solutions to battle the heat. The rise of cheap construction without consideration for local climate conditions have made them less prevalent.

For example, in Jaipur, traditional stepwells dug under houses absorb a lot of the mid-day summer heat. With some engineering, these can be scaled up to cool entire neighborhoods with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps [1].

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about climate change. But some mitigations are staring at us in the face. Others will take a while to become usable/cheap enough to be deployed at scale.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump)

<comment><USER17> It really depends on if prospective climate change is something that has prior solutions that can be adapted for modern land use and urban demands. There's always been historically appropriate architectural typologies to manage regional climate, but also massive enough climate shifts that cause entire regions to be abandoned. Typically it's water shortage, which can be a zero- sum problem, India/Pakistan, Egypt/Ethiopia, China and all of Mekong etc. But yeah, I think inhospitable heat and humidity in this study is largely... technically and economically solvable with building interventions, both historic and speculative. There's already many societies that's dependent on conditioned air at scale, but very few on desalinating water at scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Temperatures have been rising even further north. I'm near the 47th parallel and there was practically no winter this year. Used to have -20 degC with lots of snow, but alas. Last year's highs were above 40 degC for weeks - unimaginable 20 years ago, and rare 10 years ago.

Everyone's getting air conditioners now. For some unexplainable reasons, people still use dark colored roofs - it's time that everyone painted them white or silver, because those A/Cs will just make everything worse in the long term.

Most people seem to think it's a temporary thing. They'll believe it until it becomes the new normal I guess.

<comment><USER20> Well it is a temporary thing, the rate of change is still increasing. We'll reach the new normal a number of decades after we stop burning fossil fuel.

<comment><USER21> > after we stop burning fossil fuel

You mean, when we run out of fossil fuel?

<comment><USER22> That's just not going to happen by any measure. Deposits might become more and more expensive to tap into, but we're not just going to run out. We need to stop using them, not hope that we'll just stop once they are out - they simply won't be.

<comment><USER23> That is what everyone means when they say "run out of oil". Read it as "run out of oil worth extracting". We're obviously not going to spend 2 TJ of energy to extract oil that contains 1 TJ of energy.

<comment><USER24> This assumes we use the oil purely due to its energy content. Which is true in some sense or the other, but unless you can replace all uses of oil derivatives with either synthetic sources (that don't cost significantly more energy to create than the oil extraction would) or something different altogether (e.g. in the "producing electricity" use case).

And even then, who knows whether dumping spare electricity into oil wells instead of e.g. batteries or pumped storage hydroelectricity might remain profitable.

My point is, it's not necessarily that obvious, and we better not wait for people to stop running out of ideas to make a profit on fossil fuels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Climate related reports are getting scarier by the day. I am scared. Really scared. Everyone should be.

If I may, let me make a little plea.

May I remind everyone that we are not a mere spectators of the show. We are active participants. We can influence things. We as in you and I, HN crowd. It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it. I used to urge people to please go and do _something_ about climate. I think the phrasing has to change now. Please! Go out and do _everything_ you possibly can to fight climate change. The future of humanity is in _your_ hands.

<comment><USER26> > It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount > of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it.

What do you mean by a 'non-trivial amount of influence'? Sure, we can ask our employers to enforce climate-friendly practices and talk to friends and family, but even protesting companies that contribute the most to pollution doesn't provide much relief as they either ignore the protests or make small changes that give them positive PR and make the less active people happy to stop trying.

What steps can a random person take to actually help the planet? I'm asking this without a shred of irony or doom and gloom, I legitimately would be happy to help stop the crisis but the only thing I can think of is planting dozens of trees every year.

<comment><USER27> If you own a house in the US, you can very likely cut your energy use at least in half even without lifestyle changes. Cut back air travel and switch from a gas powered vehicle to an alternative that works for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Most of these models will be proven inaccurate. If there's anything "climate scientists" have demonstrated over the past 100 years or so, it's that they have little to no understanding of the global climate. Have any of their "predictions" aged well?

<comment><USER29> > Have any of their "predictions" aged well?

No, but only in the sense that they've tended to be too conservative and to understate the degree and pace of change.

And just to be clear, the paper linked to is a review of weather station data which finds that extreme heat & humidity conditions are occurring sooner and more frequently than models predicted.

<comment><USER28> Way off. The vast majority of their doom and gloom claims have been completely disproven. Only the woefully ignorant peddle this stuff.

It's perfectly natural for the weather to be extremely hot and humid sometimes.

<comment><USER30> [https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate- mo...](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are- getting-future-warming-projections-right/)

Unless you believe that NASA are in on the whole conspiracy because of, um, some reason I can't even fathom...

<comment><USER31> Don't feed the low effort trolls. Downvote, flag and ignore.

<comment><USER30> The only options available for dealing with misinformed conspiracy theorists are downvoting, flagging, ignoring and rebuttal. The first three are interpreted as validation. It sucks, but that's the reality.

<comment><USER31> You forget about moderation. HN has pretty active moderators who generally come down hard on trolls and bad faith arguments.

The troll may see it as validation when their posts are struck down, but that only matters to them, and since they're struck down and banned, it doesn't matter to anyone else.

For some cases, I agree that a well-pointed rebuttal _can_ be effective, not to convince the troll, but rather to inform the audience. You cannot convince the troll, but you can show the audience how his arguments are flawed and false.

There is a balance, because you also risk giving his posts more attention, which is counterproductive. If possible, take the arguments to a place where the people who are already sympathetic to your arguments are in the majority. Have the discussion on your home turf, don't discuss in forums where the troll has the majority.

And obviously know when to disengage. Arguing with a pure bad faith troll is utterly pointless, they'll just keeping spinning bullshit while you try to seat down their nonsense. The takes a lot of effort on your part and absolutely none on theirs. In the process, they get to air even more of their nonsense to an audience.

Facts are precise and specific, lies are random, unlimited and don't have to have any connection to truth or reality.

<comment><USER30> Yep, but dang and co are quite light on the moderation (which I respect, mostly) so I find rebuttal to be the most likely response to succeed on HN.

I think your point regarding showing the audience is the salient one here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Large inexpensive wall mount computer displays? - <AUTHOR>

We were going to use a TV to display a few monitoring and stats overviews in the office but most TVs are over-built in the areas we don't care about, and under-built in the areas we do.
Anyone know of a rather large (40" or larger) display that is inexpensive and just has an HDMI, DVI or even VGA hookup?
I figure tradeshow booths and similar must use something but I'm not sure what to search for.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> We use the same display as the Panic folks for this: <http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/>

Aside of a hiccup upon delivery, it works well, has a built in computer(!), and is built to stay on 24/7.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. Removing the need for the computer definitely makes the increased price much more palatable along with the more industrial design and use case.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A friend just told me that CostCo VIZIO (house brand) TVs are decent and cheap for this kind of thing.

Something like this: [http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11539014...](http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11539014&whse=BC&Ne=5000133%204000000&eCat=BC|79|2341&N=4001374%204294899201%204294899947&Mo=14&No=0&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ns=P_Price|0||P_SignDesc1&lang=en- US&Sp=C&topnav=)

<comment><USER3> Vizio isn't Costco's in-house brand. It's a legit. <http://www.vizio.com>

Insignia, however, is an example of an in house brand by Best Buy.

<comment><USER3> You might want to try to snag a nice used monitor from Amazon's used electronics site: <http://www.warehousedeals.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see cheap LCD TV's of 40" or more for sale at Fry's for $600 or so all the time. I think that's your answer. As for what's used at trade shows, just that, large TV's, and they're rented at exorbitant rates!

Going to be next to impossible to find something without audio or a remote, and if you do, it will be a "monitor" designed for high-end use and will be way to expensive.

</comment><comment><USER5> Dynex at bestbuy 42" is around $500. It's got a vga and hdmi. Works nicely with my computer.

</comment><comment><USER6> What kind of resolution do you need?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the sweet spot is 1920 x 1080, which is 1080p.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ever been to Best Buy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not as cheap as I was hoping for. This thing doesn't even need audio or a remote. :-)</comment></comment>


Autodraw – Fast Drawing for Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/topics/machine-learning/fast-drawing-everyone/ <comment><USER2> It's not really "auto-draw" as much as it's a visual search in which you suggest shapes and it looks across the collection for visually similar icons. Impressive and fun, but not yet a huge advancement over just typing "house" or "cake" to search the image library.

<comment><USER3> Their description made it sound like a really cool lower-level tool, so obviously it ends up being a letdown.

Drawing/art programs generally have a line smoothing feature - just smoothing your wobbly lines as you draw, using relatively simple algorithms. The description here made me hope for something more "medium-level", half-way between the two. It wouldn't just smooth your lines - it would adjust them according to context, based on a corpus of more precise line drawings, and perhaps predict/suggest the next strokes. It might be difficult to pull off though, if implemented naively it would probably just work against the artist.

<comment><USER4> This kind of functionality sort of exists in a basic form in the default mail on iOS using a feature called Markup. Markup tries to guess if you drew an arrow or a circle and suggests it based on your drawing.

<comment><USER5> On a similar note, this site can recognize handwritten mathematical equations (not just one symbol at a time):

[https://webdemo.myscript.com/views/math.html](https://webdemo.myscript.com/views/math.html)

<comment><USER6> as well as microsoft's baked right into office Ink to Math convert

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not a drawing tool. It's a search engine for clip art. That's very Google.

This may be the answer for how to enter emoji. There are now over 2600 emoji, with more to come. Keyboard selection isn't working and menus are huge.

<comment><USER8> On iOS I just write the emoji name and it appears in the suggestions. Much, much easier than trying to draw it.

<comment><USER9> GBoard does that too.

<comment><USER10> And SwiftKey as well

<comment><USER11> And helm-unicode!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was a cog in the machine [1]. You're welcome for my 1e-23'th-sized contribution.

[1] [https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/](https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/)

<comment><USER13> Heads up: That fails to connect for me.

<comment><USER12> _shrug_ , works for me.

<comment><USER13> Yep, it's back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This crowd might appreciate the following comic, which I made with autodraw.com (the tool this post is about) --

[http://imgur.com/a/WWff9](http://imgur.com/a/WWff9)

It took me about an hour, after I got incredibly frustrated that it wouldn't let me draw anything. Can't draw a robot. Can't draw a sad face (only smiley face). Can't even draw a stick figure. Can't draw a speech bubble.

I felt like it was fighting with me for what it wanted to draw, while leaving very basic and fundamental shapes out. There were more things I couldn't draw, I can't even remember everything.

<comment><USER14> Also a couple of bug report type things:

-> There's an undo button, it works well. But there should be a redo button. (Or the Apple-Y or Ctrl-Y keyboard shortcut for redo ought to work.)

-> See how my smiley face is too big on the right? Well I can't make it smaller: even if I zoom way in (there's a zoom functionality) I can't use the select tool to just select the smiley face (inside the jail) to reduce it in size. I'd have to recreate the parts of this image separately.

-> There is no way to set line thickness on the clip art! This should be one of the easiest things to set - but you can only scale the whole image, not the line width. That makes it hard to work with.

Overall I found the experience frustrating.

I have a challenge for you guys though: for the most common hundred thousand or so words, use a machine learning algorithm on your own Image Search results, to try to come up with canonical ideas of what the objects in question might look like, after sorting them into categories based on similarity of recognized features. Then have the algorithm create an outline using the canonical idea it has derived for each category.

What I mean is that if someone Google's "hand" they might get: left hand, right hand, fist, middle finger, OK sign, I mean there really are only so many ways to hold a hand, or visual meanings/memes for the idea of "hand", and other artists already have introduced a canonical version. (Likewise "stick figure" has a meme around it.)

So for each one of those, the algorithm could learn from every version of that that it judges as similar to each other -- and then draw it's own for each one! (Computer algorithms are good at drawing in a learned style, even such as Van Gogh's, etc.)

Other simple examples include a "peace sign". If you Google image search "peace sign" you obviously get a very canonical shape. Why can't a machine learning algorithm draw its own?

This idea of deriving free, creative-commons licensed images (not subject to trademark search of course), by a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge corpus of image results date (in a fair use way), without copying any of them in particular, would be huge.

You have most of the interface to do this. It is a nice next challenge for you - and a very serious one. I suggest you do it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whats the process for Google to make this sort of thing? Does some 7 figure exec say we need to make it easier to draw bikes and then Google gets their army of 10x engineers to make this happen?

<comment><USER16> [Edited because I'm dumb and can't count figures] I've mostly seen this kind of thing happen because some engineer(s) wanted to try an idea, not because it was imposed from above.

<comment><USER17> College grads make 6 figures, 7 figures is one million or higher

<comment><USER16> LOL. Yup. I'm an idiot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This would be great for flowcharts and diagrams. Sketch out a rough diagram on a tablet, and then have the shapes and lines "snap" to crisp versions as soon as they are identified. Even better if I could draw it on a whiteboard, take a photo, upload it, and get a response back as soon as it's done being converted.

<comment><USER19> There are bunch of apps that do this on ipad and Android... Plus Microsoft's note taking app, Lenovo/IBM's old X-series apps, and I'm sure others. Heck, the Newton did it.

If you're curious, try one of them out. It gets frustrating pretty quick.

<comment><USER20> Could you please name some? There seems to be an even bigger bunch of apps that do plain drawing, and it can be hard to find the needle (apps that convert rough sketches to clean line art) in the haystack (many apps for sketching; most just replicating the paper experience on a screen without adding functionality). Thanks.

<comment><USER21> Paper by FiftyThree - [https://www.fiftythree.com/paper](https://www.fiftythree.com/paper)

<comment><USER20> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google needs a better way to lifecycle these things. Clearly this project will be cancelled, so rather than just reinforce its reputation for killing its projects, perhaps they need "experimental" projects that might even get spun out of the company. Or something like that.

<comment><USER23> From the blog post: "We hope that AutoDraw, our latest A.I. Experiment, will make drawing more accessible and fun for everyone."

The Autodraw website literally says "This is an A.I. Experiment" in big letters

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Google keeps coming up with ways to use machine learning to do autofills, suggestions, etc. A month ago Allo [0], then that article in Verge about computational photography [1], then cameras without lenses [2] and now this. There is no question that this is all very powerful and awesome, but it also raises some questions, like who is the creator of a photo / drawing? Is every photo / drawing going to look the same in the future?

Here is an illustration of what I am concerned about:

My wife downloaded google "Allo" (Yet another chat app where you can change font size. Innovative, I know.). It also happens to suggest answers so you don't have to type as much.

Here is how it went:

      She: Hi!
      Me: Hi how r u
      She: Where r u
      She: Where r u now?
      She: At home?
      She: Working?
      She: I missed u
      Me: Working
      Me: Missed u too
      Me: What u doing?
      She: How are u?
      Me: Fine thank u
      Me: What about u?
      Me: What are u doing?
      Me: Can i see u?
      She: Working
      Me: Oh
      She: Yes
      Me: Where r u from?
      Me: Who are u?

And it kept on going for a long long time, none of us actually saying anything real, but both of us learning a lot about what looks like an average socially awkward American teenager conversation. It had love, beauty, cuteness, gifs, it even made us add some daily love quote bot to our thread, but we never actually typed anything ourselves because it was so easy not to. Of course we both knew it and thought that it's funny, but I can't shake this weird feeling that something is very wrong with this and that in the long term we are being brainwashed to be a dumber, more superficial version of ourselves.

p.s. I never use "r u", I find it lazy.

      [0] https://allo.google.com/
      [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13315168/google-pixel-camera-software-marc-levoy
      [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15267486/photography-machine-learning-future

Edit: formatting.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was surprised how poorly it ran on my very modern phone. And then how tiny everything was on my desktop.

When I looked past that and tried to draw a cat, it wasn't all that useful. I mean cool, you saw I was drawing a face and gave me 50 options. But what am I supposed to do with that?

It feels like a rehash of what the Newton would do when you tried to draw stuff. But it does it better. I think if I could skip the "pick what I meant" step, it would be cool for whiteboarding in the office.

<comment><USER26> That's because your very modern phone has a very puny CPU compared to even the average desktop CPU. I'm surprised about how few people know that their "2 GHz multi-core" phone is 5-10x slower than an average 5 year old desktop on common tasks.

(Edit: hehe, as evidenced by this post being downvoted. The HN audience doesn't know any better either?)

<comment><USER27> Probably downvoted because you're wrong? (Not that I did.) But this is with the caveat that this is comparing a desktop Mac to an iPhone and I haven't the faintest clue about top Android phones, although I have the understanding that the A10 destroys the current Qualcomm SoCs.

Here's an instructive article from last year comparing a 2013 Mac Pro and an iPhone 6s: [https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2016-04-15-performa...](https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2016-04-15-performance-comparisons-of-common-operations-2016-edition.html)

The relevant quote: >The most remarkable thing about this is how similar it looks to the Mac results above. Looking back at the old tests, the iPhone was orders of magnitude slower. An Objective-C message send, for example, was about 4.9ns on the Mac, but it took an eternity on the iPhone at nearly 200ns. A simple C++ virtual method call took a bit over a nanosecond on the Mac, but 80ns on the iPhone. A small malloc/free at around 50ns on the Mac took about 2 microseconds on the iPhone.

>Comparing the two today, and things have clearly changed a lot in the mobile world. Most of these numbers are just slightly worse than the Mac numbers. Some are actually faster! For example, autorelease pools are substantially faster on the iPhone. I guess ARM64 is better at doing the stuff that the autorelease pool code does.

>Reading and writing small files stands out as an area where the iPhone is substantially slower. The 16MB file tests are comparable to the Mac, but the iPhone takes nearly ten times longer for the 16-byte file tests. It appears that the iPhone's storage has excellent throughput but suffers somewhat in latency compared to the Mac's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome!

Reminds me of a little toy project I made 5 years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WswSywx6TI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WswSywx6TI)

<comment><USER29> TL;DR as you sketch on one side of the page, a dynamically updated visual search appears on the right side. Very cool. Tell us more.

<comment><USER28> Just one of my many fun throwaway projects :P It used to be up at skrch.com, but went down a while ago. Couldn't figure out how to monetize/sell it so I moved on -- I'm still not sure what sector could use something like it. The original idea actually came about in a dream (true story!) and I wondered if I could actually implement it. Took me about a month or two as I had never used OpenCV before.

The search was done with a very simple histogram analysis algorithm and the image database had about 10,000 pictures from Flickr. Results were pretty decent, but sometimes hit and miss[1]. Database costs were pretty high as I don't think there's any database out there that has any way to efficiently hash 2d histograms (so everything was stored in memory). That could be a fun challenge.

I open sourced it a while ago here: [https://github.com/dvx/skrch](https://github.com/dvx/skrch)

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5332212/feature-blob- cor...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5332212/feature-blob-correlation- and-histogram-analysis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of Chinese handwriting input methods, which have almost the exact same UI. You draw a character on the screen, and you get a selection of results at the top.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since nobody has mentioned this yet: I found that the core search functionality is not very good.

I tried drawing a frowny face, a stick figure person, and a puppy face, and it didn't recognize any of them. I'm terrible at drawing, but I feel these are objects that have a universally-understood outline.

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of detexify.

[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

<comment><USER33> That tool saved me many times. It's hard to do obscure symbolic searches in Google :')

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fun idea but doesn't really work. Just sorta replaces your random doodle with a random piece of clip art. Any trace of your original drawing is gone. Disappointing.

<comment><USER35> Isn't that the entire point? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER36> Yes, that is the point of this tool, and it probably beats slapping together a bunch of clipart based on google image search, but I was hoping it was something more than that. The tagline is misleading because it's not really helping anyone draw -- it's just a visual search for sketches.

I sketched a really rough palm tree and it suggested a bunch of tree drawings, one of which was a palm. That's helpful, but everyone who wants a palm gets the same palm. Wouldn't it be great if the tool recognized that I was trying to draw a palm and then improved mine by adjusting it according to what it knows about sketches of palms (smoothing the lines, adjusting angles, etc)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Very fun! Wishful thinking, but I'm hoping they partner with The Noun Project and add SVG downloads.

<comment><USER38> Everything looks vector-ish, was surprised it didn't download as SVG :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This would be even more interesting if one could morph the provided object with the provided sketch. Sort of like style transfer.

</comment><comment><USER40> This turned out to be a lot less interesting than it would be in my head.

Was expecting it to maybe use the data from the other drawing experiment to dream up new creations. Not just search a limited library of glyphs

</comment><comment><USER41> There are no butts, what type of auto-drawing tool doesn't include butts

<comment><USER42> You can suggest new drawings here [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWmEs3Tjb2G-31On1l...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWmEs3Tjb2G-31On1lribhwiDT9PL6SeKrt1FbG7hRAfwpvA/viewform)

<comment><USER41> I suspect there are no butts because they are a stodgy corporate entity, not because they haven't thought about butts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Useless.

[http://i.imgur.com/NmpdbT2.png](http://i.imgur.com/NmpdbT2.png)

<comment><USER44> I concur.

Drew a face and it proposes ovens and random jitters as closest matches???

[http://imgur.com/a/4mjz0](http://imgur.com/a/4mjz0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Very cool, but they need an export to SVG option. Right now it looks like it only exports to png.

<comment><USER46> I thought the same thing. SVG would be killer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This could be so much more useful than it currently is. If anyone has used Microsoft Visio you know what a pain it is to find symbols while searching through a library, especially if it isn't associated with a common noun. Where are the simple arrows, Greek letters, schematic components? Perhaps they'll be integrating this type of technology into an actual useful product in the future, like a Google Drive version of Visio?

<comment><USER48> Agreed, I feel your exact pain with Visio.

They should have this for all UNICODE characters, too. There are web services that attempt to do this, but they fail pretty miserably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> What I need is betterdraw, you input a bad drawing then it correct perspective, shapes, etc...

</comment><comment><USER50> Somebody need to feed the robot overlords with more dirty body parts.

joke aside, Adobe should not be worried just yet. It seems to be just a image tagging service or a terrible drawing application. When I draw a face of a cat it suggests a body of a cat. When I draw a rocket is suggests a glass of vine and so on.

The QuickDraw game was fun and a good idea, but basing a drawing application on "topics" from that game seems like a bad choice.

</comment><comment><USER51> Boring. Really, what's the point? It doesn't even make a connection between more than one "drawing". Try to draw a triangle, select the shape and then draw another triangle to make the two look like a square - you won't see a square option in the suggestions pane, since it doesn't see/remember your first triangle. My kid would probably like it though.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is awesome tech. And probably useful.

But, art even/esp hand drawn scribbles losses almost everything without the character and idiosyncrasies of the artist. This is little more than a fancy ui for a clipart library. Clip art sucks. Although it does have a purpose, limited as it may be.

</comment><comment><USER42> For some reason they left some `console.log` and you can see if you open the Developer Tools.

</comment><comment><USER53> My guess is that they trained the model for this with the data they collected from [Quickdraw]([https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/](https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/))

</comment><comment><USER54> Okay. This is great, but I feel like Google's off doing everything but looking after their current products. Google Inbox is in dire needs of new features to bring it in line with competitive mail products, and GMail needs a facelift.

<comment><USER55> Regarding Inbox, I couldn't care less about more features at this point, I just want better desktop web performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Wow, it's really annoying that there's no way to type text in and get that shape. I get that it's cool that it will (sometimes) recognize what I draw, but apparently I can't draw the Space Needle for the world! It would be nice to still be able to search their images with text manually instead of having to try to draw everything you want when you know you'll use what they have.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is pretty incredible. The only really important thing that's missing is the ability to flip the images horizontally or vertically. Otherwise my cow is unable to wear a helmet: [https://www.autodraw.com/share/T7HFJ9TVN91J](https://www.autodraw.com/share/T7HFJ9TVN91J)

</comment><comment><USER58> Awesome. As a board game designer, I could see myself using this to make prototype cards that look decent much easier. Although I'm sure I'll still need Illustrator to take it to the next level. But for a quick and dirty prototype, it should work great.

Much better than searching the web for hours for icons that have a similar-ish art style that have what I need.

<comment><USER59> Thenounproject.com is really good. Also, Daniel Solis sells packs of really specific board game icons.

<comment><USER58> I keep forgetting about the noun project. Also, those icons by solis look like they could be useful, thanks for letting me know about that. I was aware of an old card game design series he did, but not his Patreon. I've also picked up a few of his games that are still on my Wall of Board Game Shame and need to get played.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Two minutes use and color me unimpressed. The first thing I drew should have been a slam-dunk and it wasn't recognized. (I challenge anyone to draw a padlock that autodraw can recognize!)

Also "Fill" doesn't fill except with pre-defined shapes. What's with that?

</comment><comment><USER61> I can do a passable Bart Simpson face and the top three recommendations were for Teddy Bears. I think that's quite cool. I might throw some other stuff at it later when I have a stylus to play with. Love finding out about these things.

</comment><comment><USER62> This reminds me of the excellent [http://shapecatcher.com/](http://shapecatcher.com/), except for an icon library instead of a Unicode font.

</comment><comment><USER63> "There's nothing to download"

Yeah, that's the web for you. With all the obsession with apps in recente years, I'm glad to hear that being advertised.

Maybe we're hitting an App saturation point.

</comment><comment><USER64> It's really cute. I wonder if Google is going to use all the classification that people will do of their own sketches to teach its machines... to recognize hand-drawn sketches.

<comment><USER65> That was my first thought as well. But I do wonder about the quality of submissions given that most people can't draw with a mouse as well as they can with a writing utensil (assuming a drawing tablet or touchscreen is not used either).

<comment><USER66> > assuming a drawing tablet or touchscreen is not used either

Given the prevalence of mobile devices, some of which use styluses—even ignoring touchscreen laptop and desktop screens—why would you assume that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> One issue I see is that you can only export pngs. It would have been really useful to be able to copy the selected drawing elements and paste them into a Google Drawing

</comment><comment><USER68> What other people think : "Oh! what a cool drawing app, Google is so awesome!"

What I think : "Oh what an interesting way of crowd sourcing ML data, Google is so smart!"

</comment><comment><USER69> I can't see the auto suggestions on Google Autodraw. Sort of defeats the purpose... Anyone with the same problem? I have a macbook pro.

</comment><comment><USER70> Only thing that seems to be missing is a way to re-arrange the shapes (z-order). I tried page-up/down and right-clicking but no luck.

</comment><comment><USER71> Tried to draw a dick, failed to be recognized.

</comment><comment><USER72> interesting, it definitely supports the narrative of AI replacing changing our jobs, in this case the designer.

For less artistic folks like me, this tool is from heavens. How many times did you want to illustrate a simple diagram but couldn't draw or use photoshop?

Having said that I can see Autodraw still needs more work done. It failed to recognize a phallus.

</comment><comment><USER73> Really interesting idea that isn't yet implemented well enough to be that interesting in practice.

The idea of machine learning refining your drawings as you go, forming a sort of cooperative artistic partnership, is fascinating.

The idea of machine learning somewhat sloppily matching your drawings to pre- existing ones and just replacing them.....well, kinda just feels like image search copy/pasted into microsoft paint.

But it's a start!

</comment><comment><USER74> If anyone else is confused about it not working, check if privacybadger is blocking inputtools.google.com

</comment><comment><USER75> _With Autodraw, there 's nothing to download, nothing to install..._

An installation one would be nice, though.

</comment><comment><USER76> Guns don't exist, but swords do.

</comment><comment><USER77> unfortunately I get

Over Quota This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

<comment><USER26> (I guess Google made it using App Engine.)

This is a little embarassing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I can't see the auto suggestion bar on my Macbook pro. Anyone with the same problem???

</comment><comment><USER78> Try getting it to display fire or flame that isn't attached to a candle or birthday cake.

</comment><comment><USER79> Reminds a lot of shapecatcher (shapecatcher.com): Unicode character recognition by drawing.

</comment><comment><USER80> The name AutoDraw sounds like it is created by Autodesk, the creator of AutoCAD and AutoSketch.

</comment><comment><USER81> Got my hopes up for a really easy drawing program. Instead got an icon finder.

</comment><comment><USER82> AI experiment? Bet the world pictionary champ is starting to sweat :P

</comment><comment><USER83> I'm seeing 404 for the images, wonder if it auto-reports that.

</comment><comment><USER84> ok i drew a cock and balls and the top matches were saxophones

<comment><USER85> Does that mean it works? More importantly, how was the AI trained in genitalia recognition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> This is a really clever data collection technique. ;)

</comment><comment><USER87> Never suggests anything on linux Chrome 57.0.2987.133

<comment><USER88> I had to allow third party cookies to inputtools.google.com in privacy badger for it to suggest things

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> This is literally the "Write the kanji" feature which has been present in Google Translate for years, with a different 'character set.' Not exactly impressive.

</comment><comment><USER90> Wow, the blacklist of classes is really long.

</comment><comment><USER91> Don't get used to it... If it's an "experiment", and "free", then it will likely get shutdown.

</comment><comment><USER92> Great, more clip art. /s

</comment><comment><USER93> tried drawing some circuit components but they weren't in the library :(

<comment><USER94> I couldn't get a horse. It was a horrible drawing, though.

<comment><USER36> It thought my horse was pliers, a camel, or a hand gesture: [http://imgur.com/a/JWifP](http://imgur.com/a/JWifP)

<comment><USER59> Someone could make a great version of "Eat poop, you cat" with this.

<comment><USER36> Oh, hell yes.

1\. Make a sketch of your choice 2\. Pick the first AutoDraw suggestion (or randomly one of the first N) 3\. Feed that to google image search 4a. Google's _best guess for this image_ is a prompt for the next human sketch. Repeat from 2. OR 4b. Pick a sketch-like image from the results of 3 and reproduce on the AutoDraw canvas. Repeat from 2.

I got an amazing result on my first attempt at 1 - 3:

Autodraw (Cat > Raccoon): [http://imgur.com/a/Fy00K](http://imgur.com/a/Fy00K)

Google Images (Raccoon > "Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses"): [http://imgur.com/a/F3z1T](http://imgur.com/a/F3z1T)

It'd be hilarious to automate this, set it running, and just watch it go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Hey

</comment><comment><USER95> nryche0725

</comment><comment><USER96> I didn't realize there were now brand top level domains, such as `.google`. Here is a list of more, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_dom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_domains#Brand_top-level_domains)</comment>